„Trotz eines drastischen Rückgangs der Geburtenrate bleibt die Zahl der an der Universität Tokio zugelassenen Studenten im Vergleich zu vor 40 Jahren unverändert. Es gibt schwerwiegende Gründe, warum Japans nationale Stärke abnehmen wird, wenn die Einschreibungsquote nicht gesenkt wird.“

The tōdai fetish japanese people have is absolutely insane. Assuming they keep only admitting the smartest people in the country (which they aren’t), then this still holds true even if they have less people to choose from. In that hypothetical the least smart person would be less smart than the previous year, but still in the top X of the country.

Gonna question the premise that “elite” college enrollment in either direction is directly correlated with national strength.

I attended this university for grad school, and used the demographic skew to my advantage – the department I was applying for accepted up to six new master’s candidates each year, and the number was set decades before, when there were more young people than there were in the mid-2000s, when I applied. Grad school has also never been as popular here as it is in the US or Europe.

The year I applied, there were only twelve applicants, of which only three moved on from the written-test stage to the in-person interview stage. Because the university would not lower its standards for acceptance, we never even came close to filling all six „seats“ each year. In most years while I was there, we only took in one or two.

With our „Ice Age“ generation (氷河期) being disadvantaged in so many other ways, I was happy to find one area in which things got a little easier for us. I can’t speak for the undergrad level, but I don’t think the university is required to take in people who don’t actually *pass* the exams. So today, the standard of „if you can pass, you’ll get in“ is really fairer if you’re in high school and planning your future than when there was a lottery element to it.

University professor here. The entrance exams ostensibly serve the purpose of weeding out students who are unprepared for the level of academic rigor required by the university. Because of what’s happening lately, though, (ie letting in the number of students who took the test to meet admissions quotas, regardless of the students’ actual test scores) we’re seeing loads of students who cannot do university-level work. I’m talking essentially functionally illiterate students. Sure, they can read kanji (as in, say the words out loud) but cannot actually parse the meaning of sentences longer than a LINE post. Universities have been scrambling to set up remedial programs for these students, because they are simply not at a level in Japanese, math, and English that they should be for college-level work. A lot of these students will fail out of university regardless of these remedial programs, because college is absolutely not for everyone. That’s not gatekeeping, that’s just reality. Most of these students didn’t study much in high school and have no intention of studying now. They went to college because that’s what everyone told them they should do when in fact they’d probably be better off going to a trade school like beauty school (or whatever actually interests them).

Capitalism demands a massive under class exists and is easily exploited for cheap profits.